In the lead up to the 2024 budget, the ALP has just released one of the most idiotic and infuriating documents they’ve ever produced, their ‘Future Gas Strategy’.
After being elected to do something serious about the climate crisis, and having more positions on gas than the kama sutra in recent years, the Albanese government is now saying methane has a big future in this country, well beyond 2050.
Adding insult to injury, they’re claiming extracting and burning fossil gas will ‘support decarbonisation of the Australian economy’ and ‘help our trade partners on their own paths to net zero’.
Resources Minister Madeleine King has gone on her version of a charm offensive to accompany the release of the new strategy, saying gas exploration needs to be ramped up and existing discoveries need to be fully exploited, or the sky will fall.
This is exactly the opposite of what climate science says needs to happen if we are to maintain a liveable environment on what is our only home.
The gas industry’s long-claimed and long-discredited assertion that gas is a bridging fuel to a renewable nirvana takes centre stage in the new document, as well as the usual nonsense about carbon capture and ‘reducing gas-related emissions’ while simultaneously drilling and exporting more gas than ever before.
This is in essence an identical strategy to Scott Morrison’s much derided ‘gas-led recovery’ from COVID, another initiative scripted by the gas industry. The frightening thing is that the current government is doing this with its eyes completely open, unable to claim ignorance, stupidity or religious mania as excuses.
Big bucks?
Labor’s gas strategy is equally idiotic from an economic or environmental perspective. The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss has been reminding the government for some time that it makes more money from HECS than from the petroleum resource rent tax, and there is nothing in the new strategy which addresses that.
Madeleine King says gas generates $72 billion of export income, when as Mr Dennis points out, that actually represents the profits flowing to an 80 per cent foreign owned industry, not money paying for roads and hospitals.
Australia will have to pay for the water, toxicity and climate impacts of unconventional gas for generations.
The central problem actually being faced by industries that use gas in this country – its outrageously high price – is a problem entirely of the gas industry’s making, with almost all of our gas being exported, and prices trebling as a result. Now the solution is apparently to export even more gas.
Right now, there is a temporary price cap on wholesale gas prices, but as Orica CEO Sanjeev Gandhi said last week, this cap has effectively become a floor price. His company has manufacturing operations in the USA and Australia, but their factory in Queensland (from where a lot of Australia’s gas is exported), has to pay three times as much for the gas they need.
People ignored
Labor’s gas strategy ignores the fervent opposition from First Nations to fracking for unconventional gas, while paying lip service to ‘connection to country’ and talking vaguely about benefit sharing. It ignores the many rallies from young people concerned about the climate impacts of fossil fuels, while pretending to be interested in the future. It ignores the laws of physics by claiming that the unconventional gas industry can be accelerated while emissions fall.
The lobbyists’ victory over democracy is almost complete. Santos and Woodside couldn’t have written anything better suited to their business interests.
And all this is coming from a government which says it wants to host a UN climate conference here in 2026. This is beyond embarrassing. The correct word is criminal.
No one who is serious about the climate emergency can vote for a party which adopts this absurd approach. The Greens and teals will be clear beneficiaries.
If this gas strategy becomes entrenched as policy, Labor may lose any hope of future majority government.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning film-maker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
Long ago, he did work experience in Parliament House with Mungo MacCallum.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
